Back-to-back wins against the two best teams in baseball notwithstanding, let’s suppose that the Yankees are done. That they not only have nearly no chance of winning the American League East, but that the last two months of horrible luck and bad play, and the sheer number of good clubs in the American League Central, will make it impossible for them to win the wild card as well. I don’t grant this premise, as the Yankees still have at least as much talent as any team in the league and more than enough time to make a playoff run, but there’s a reasonable argument to be made that it’s so, and that the long-delayed collapse has finally come. This leaves a simple question: Is it necessarily a bad thing?

This year and next year were always going to be a time of transition for the Yankees, even in the best circumstances. After this season, Alex Rodriguez will probably exercise a clause in his contract that allows him to become a free agent. (I say “probably” simply because his agent, Scott Boras, rightly prefers to let the market decide how much his clients should be paid whenever possible.) Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada will be free agents as well, the team holds options on the contracts of Andy Pettitte and Bobby Abreu, and of course, manager Joe Torre’s contract expires at the end of the year. Next year will be nearly as busy: After the 2008 campaign, the Yankees will be done with their commitments to Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, and general manager Brian Cashman. And looming over all of this are the perpetual questions of who, exactly, is in charge of the Yankees, and who will be in charge in the future.

For the Yankees, the complex of decisions and opportunities presented by the expiration of so many contracts is more important than the question of whether or not they make the playoffs this year. After all, they’re very, very rich, and they have young talent; falling short this year is not going to doom them to irrelevance. It would, though, allow them the chance to make decisions based on the long-term interests of the team. Even better, it would allow them to think about what those long-term interests are.

Much of the reason the Yankees have done poorly this year has been down to simple bad luck. Beyond the bad luck of a variety of freakish pitcher injuries, the team also has a worse record than it probably should — having scored 227 runs and allowed 200 going into last night’s game, the Yankees haven’t really played like a sub-.500 team. You can also, though, blame this year’s disaster on the fact that the team is just old. Abreu went into last night’s game slugging .314; Jason Giambi was slugging .431, Johnny Damon, .357. Mussina had a 5.64 ERA; Rivera, a 6.75 ERA. There are a lot of benefits to having All-Star players in their 30s, but older players are vulnerable to abrupt decline, and when you count on a lot of older players, you’re susceptible to this sort of thing.

The Yankees are to some extent paying the bill for a long run of division titles won with veteran talent that had to be signed to contracts that took them well past their prime years. That doesn’t mean they were wrong to do so, just that there are consequences for bringing in a brigade of wellseasoned talent every year to prop up a run of pennants. The Yankees have never written a season off to establish a new position and avoid having to make questionable longterm commitments, and since they haven’t had the kind of farm system that the Braves had during their run of division championships, it was inevitable that their reliance on oldsters would eventually catch up with them.

A season in which they miss the playoffs, then, might not be such a bad thing if the team takes advantage of the opportunity it provides to really assess what they want to do and how they want to do it. Do they want to make the playoffs every year, even if it means constantly taking on bad contracts and committing to playing expensive veterans at the end of their usefulness? That’s perfectly defensible; a team that makes the playoffs every year has a chance to win a championship every year. But if they’ve been pressed into that goal by circumstances, it would be a good idea to try and master circumstances. As well as he’s hitting this year, for instance, Jorge Posada is a 35-year-old catcher; would signing him to a new deal really be the best idea for the future, or would it be better to sign a stopgap while looking for a long-term solution? Do the Yankees really want to lock themselves into playing a 38-year-old Alex Rodriguez at a salary of something near $30 million?

For years now, the Yankees have won by sheer mass. The idea has been to assemble an overwhelming number of old, great players, live with the fact that some of them are just going to drop off a cliff, and deal with that by adding more old, great players. This kind of policy eventually takes on its own logic and its own momentum. There’s another way to build a perpetual winner, though — one that values flexibility, one that tolerates the risks associated with young players in the knowledge that those risks come with their own rewards, and one that exhibits an awareness that there are worse things than missing the playoffs in a given year. By signing veteran players to short contracts this last winter and counting on players like Robinson Cano and Phil Hughes this year, the Yankees have already implicitly accepted this approach. If this year’s disappointment inspires them to really embrace it, Yankees fans in 2012 just might look back at this year with a special fondness. Losing is bad, after all, but not learning anything from losing is worse.

tmarchman@nysun.com